East African Business Week

In the days leading up to the most important football match in Uganda’s recent history, a rumour started to circulate that if you wanted to make it into the stadium to watch the game - even if you had a ticket in hand - you had to arrive at least four hours early. Maybe five. Or maybe you should just camp at Namboole Stadium the night before. Because the lines? They were going to be long. And security was going to be tight. It was the general chaos that is any event in Kampala ratcheted up to a ten.
So when I showed up at my friend's house at 10 a.m., ready to leave for the stadium to watch a game that didn't start until 5 p.m., I got mighty anxious at how long he took admiring himself in his new Uganda Cranes jersey (and doing various and sundry other household chores, like helping his sister with the laundry).
Finally, one long boda boda ride later, we arrived at the base of the stadium grounds. And after weaving our way up the hill, through an endless line of people offering to cover my face with what I am certain was paint meant to be used for walls, not human skin, we got to the ticket gates.* Naturally, we were inside the stadium within about ten minutes. The only hiccup, amidst all the expediency, was the abandonment of our carefully packed bottles of water due to police requirements. This will be important later.
There we were. It was 2 p.m. The stadium was almost fully packed and there were still three hours to go before the match started.
I figure at this point a blow-by-blow of the game that eventually followed - the 0-0 tie that kept Uganda out of the Africa Cup of Nations (32 years running!), the near-riot when fans started throwing their vuvuzelas at cops adorned in full riot gear - is slightly overdone at this point. Instead, I offer the highlights of the three hours we spent waiting for the match to start:
The Vuvuzela Chorus
Hearing vuvuzelas at the South African World Cup on my television screen? So cute. So colorful. So fun to say. Hearing vuvuzelas in real life? In a packed stadium where every. single. person. brought his or her own vuvuzela and an extra pocket-sized one, just in case? It's like a special and ridiculous torture only a Bond villain would design. It's a mixture of deafening and whining. So you don't just get drowned in sound, you get constantly, incessantly hit by it.
And they are loud. That's the most surprising thing. They're sheets of cheap, brightly colored plastic wrapped into a tube. But somehow they produce NOISE. Real noise. The kind of noise that will blow out both of your eardrums and then tell you you're ugly.
This was by no means limited to the first hour, but it was certainly the most remarked-upon element of the first hour. By the second hour everyone was so deaf they couldn't engage each other in conversation